Not all of us have access to a personal coach. Leverage Your Best—Ditch the Rest: The Coaching Secrets Top Executives Depend On was written for us. In it, Scott Blanchard, founder of Coaching.com, and Madeline Homan, vice president of Blended Solutions at The Ken Blanchard Companies and a founder of Coaching.com, help us answer the three key questions an executive coach might ask:
- How do you see yourself?
- How do others see you?
- How do you want to be seen?
Asking the above questions, say the authors, prepares you for the fourth question:
- What strategies can I employ to make me more effective and influential?
To address this last question, say Blanchard and Homan, we need to consider both the risk of doing things differently and the type of support that will help us achieve our “prime objective.”
It’s especially critical, say the authors, to identify our “tolerations”; that is, those behaviors that get in the way of our being the best that we can be. Either we don't recognize these as negative behaviors or we fail to see how much they are keeping us from success. According to the authors, still another reason for our tolerations is that we believe that it will take too much time or be inconvenient to rid ourselves of them.
Finally, say Blanchard and Homan, “We may tolerate these behaviors because we have no idea how to ditch them.” The authors suggest that we identify these obstacles to success, then develop action plans for those we can eliminate. For example, some tolerations act like weeds on a lawn or dust bunnies under a bed—no matter how hard we work to rid ourselves of them, we need to accept that they will come back. “Not everything can be fixed,” say Blanchard and Homan. However, they add, “That often is our choice.”
Take the tolerations in business and personal relationships. According to the authors, we have it within ourselves to put an end to troublesome relationships. We can cope with personal issues by bringing them to the surface. On the job, we can put an end to turf battles or substandard performance by our staff members. Admittedly, it can be unpleasant to address them, but eliminating draining or unsupportive people in our lives can significantly bring us closer to being able to leverage our talents.
The authors don't suggest that executive coaches are unnecessary, but they do suggest that many changes in our lives begin with a simple willingness to change.
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